Bloodsuckers Redux

The consummation of a certain bit of literary leechery by a sports coach and a "renowned screenwriter" has been scheduled for late September. Bram Stoker's descendant and his assistant from the Transylvanian Society of Dracula have got their sticky fingers on Stoker's original notes, and have plundered them for characters and plot threads which were excised from what will doubtless henceforth be known as The Official Dracula Saga - Episode 1. They have also included Stoker as a character, directing and producing the play Dracula at the Lyceum Theatre, where the offspring of Jonathan and Mina Harker is pursuing what Amazon's product description refers to as "a career in stage". All this delightful intertextuality is taking place with the approval of the Stoker estate, whose record of good taste in these matters is not the most encouraging. Stoker's widow registered strenuous legal objection to F W Murnau's film adaptation, Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horrors, and did her best to have every negative and print destroyed; for which karmic vindictiveness she was doubtless reincarnated as a Daily Mail film critic. A decade after Murnau's film, the Stoker estate gave its support to Universal's plodding and stagey version starring Bela Lugosi; but has apparently withheld its approbation from every other story featuring the character.

At the risk of becoming a Daily Mail critic myself, I don't think I shall lend my own approbation to this enterprise. I might even publish a vampire story in September myself, just to give this one a bit of competition. Whether mine will be better than The Official Dracula Saga - Episode 2.0 is of course debatable; but I believe I can guarantee that it will be slightly cheaper, considerably shorter, and decidedly weirder.